


How Lovely Are Your Branches

by carriedon_awolfsback



Category: Ghost (Sweden Band)
Genre: Cat Videos, Gen, Gift Fic, Secret Santa Fic, Slice of Life, a tragic fate for one mini tree, demons being disparaging about Christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 03:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17154506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriedon_awolfsback/pseuds/carriedon_awolfsback
Summary: “They gorge on meat and sweets and make spiced biscuits in the shape of little people and their houses, and eat them, and fight with their relatives because they can’t avoid them. And they do give each other presents, but they resent having to do it and get jealous of what other people recieve. They just forget all the love and light stuff. Can’t help themselves. It’s the easiest time of year for temptations, because it’s all money, money, money and greed.““That sounds more like it. *I* want meat and presents and a fight.”





	How Lovely Are Your Branches

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @perinferiadastra on Tumblr.com as part of the 2018 Ghost BC Secret Santa event! Enjoy!

“What… is it?”

 

The lithe little band ghoul the humans had nicknamed ‘Dewdrop’ regarded the garish decoration someone had added to the low, plain altar at the front of the ghouls’ dedicated prayer chapel. It was a potted miniature fir tree, although he could smell from a distance that it was all made of fresh, smelly plastic and not a natural plant. It was studded with cheap-looking trinkets that hung off the branches by string- tiny sets of bells, a couple of crude carvings that vaguely resembled stags or something similar, lots of little brightly-coloured balls with snowflakes drawn on them-  and there was a bit of something made of even more acrid artificial material draped on it; something purple and sparkly made of shreds twined together in a long scarf of the papery material.

 

There was a five-pointed gold star drooping from the top where someone had forgone the attachment clip helpfully provided between two of the points, and tried to affix it in a manner more honouring Baphomet and the pentagram instead, using a lot of sellotape.

 

“Christmas tree,” the big Aether male sniffed, also aggravated by the smell. “Somebody’s idea of a joke.”

 

“Don’t like it,” Dewdrop said decisively. “Ugly. Smells bad. Not funny.”

 

“Kind of like you, then.”

 

Dew hissed and arched his tail, as easily needled as ever. “I’ll burn it, and you.”

 

“Maybe we should get rid of it,” Aether conceded, smothering his laughter.

 

“Plastic won’t burn very well.” Dewdrop cracked each set of knuckles against his opposite hand. “Still gonna try, though.”

 

“Not in the chapel,” Aether hissed agitatedly, batting at the smaller male’s hands with his own. “You’ll burn the floorboards and dirty the walls and it’ll smell, and the Sisters will blame all of us for you being stupid,  _ again _ .”

 

Dewdrop snorted heavily. “Still mad because that tall Sister won’t kiss you any more since I burnt her bedroom door down looking for you? That was weeks ago.” He ignored Aether’s displeased hiss. “I’m not letting this thing sit in here all winter, it looks stupid.”

 

“Take it outside and burn it, then.”

 

“Don’t burn it, I think it’s pretty.” A female ghoul had slithered up beside her compatriots quietly as they bickered, and reached out a hand to bat at one of the colourful decorative trinkets. Aether recognised her as one half of a duo who he’d seen Sister Imperator auditioning in the practise rooms a few weeks ago. The Sister has looked very pleased with them; there was a good chance they would become his and Dewdrop’s band project partners, someday soon- if the rumoured stalemate over the future of the frontman figure could be broken.

 

“Pretty?” Dewdrop held his jaws stiffly apart and let his forked tongue loll out in a display of disgust. “It’s  _ holy _ .”

 

“Not holy. Just traditional,” Aether corrected him. “They stole it from the pagans, added it to Christmas.”

 

“Doesn’t surprise me.” The small female was still playing with the baubles that hung from its plastic branches, her clawtips jostling a little tin bell which clinked faintly. “Can we at least have the decorations?”

 

“Fine, take the shinies.” Dew snorted. “Not that purple crap, though. Smells... cheap and sticky and nasty.”

 

“Tinsel,” Aether provided.

 

She didn’t need telling twice, immediately swiping the brightest baubles off the tree and pocketing them gleefully. She took the little bell last, grasping the string carefully, and looping it over one of her horns. “It’s an earring.”

 

“Why’s it on your horn and not on your ear, then?” Dewdrop muttered half to himself.

 

“No human word for a horn decoration, idiot,” she hissed back irritably.

 

“What-fucking-ever,” Dew finally threw his hands up and stepped up to the altar, “I don’t like this thing and I’m getting rid of it.” And he swept the tacky thing up in his bony arms, hissing with displeasure at how scratchy the false pine needles felt on even his thick skin. He half-carried and half-dragged the offending spiky item down off the altar, and hoisted it in his arms like a prize catch. “Come on, let’s kill it. If it doesn’t burn right you two can, can blow it over the roof or drop it through a black hole or something.”

 

As he set off with the tree over his shoulder and the other two in tow, without warning the chapel door swung open on the ghouls, who jumped and shuffled back as one startled being. It revealed two human forms, stepping in from the shadowed entranceway with the winter wind from outside still coiled around them, making them seem much more imposing and uncanny they really were.

 

The third Emeritus, dressed in all-black casuals but still sporting the paint markings afforded to him by his birth and office; and attending him a red-clad Cardinal that the trio all recognised as the older male everyone called Copia, who had his own private office where he did very boring things but could often be cajoled to feed a passing ghoul a tea biscuit. Humans could be hard to pick out from one another at times, which was presumably why they relied so heavily on giving their young those long formal names- but Copia was a relatively easy one for the ghouls, with his privileged white eye and the hair he groomed into distinctive markings on his cheeks and above his mouth.

 

Aether briefly wondered why he had seen the Cardinal out of his office and attending the bloodline clergy several times lately. He paid more attention to the comings and goings of the humans than most of the ghouls did; it was just in his nature to be inquisitive, and he was naturally quite talented in remembering their languages and odd little habits. The Cardinal’s duties had always resided firmly with the Sister, for whom he was a bit of a teacher’s pet; largely taking on her duller desk-bound duties while she enjoyed the more entertaining aspects of playing Camerlengo for Nihil and his sons. Surely there couldn’t be any truth to the rumour mill’s latest colourful output- the theory that the Sister was simply cutting out the middleman, and had started grooming Copia himself for the band project’s vacant leadership spot, with the more or less resentful help of his predecessors. That was tantamount to being gifted the Papal succession at this point, given the... delicate situation the bloodline had found itself in, and while Aether had a lot of respect for the Cardinal from what little he knew of him and his biscuit-sharing habits… well. The man seemed cut from a very different cloth to that of the Emeritus brothers, to say the least. He had a canny but quiet, hunted air about him whereas they radiated the entitlement and security of their birth, and he moved around others with human erraticness and hesitancy rather than their serpentine confidence.

 

(Aether had caught him side-stepping and swaying smoothly to an unfamiliar murmured tune of his own once, when both had raided the church kitchens in the small hours at the same time. But as soon as he’d heard the ghoul’s deliberate cough behind him, the man had stumbled and clammed up, backing into the countertop with pink cheeks like a child caught misbehaving. He’d stayed as such until Aether had slipped away with his kitchen scraps, despite the ghoul’s best attempt at a friendly, conspiratorial wink.)

 

But now both senior clergymen’s wide, mismatched eyes roved over the unexpected sight before them in the chapel doorway, and it produced two very different reactions at the exact same time:

 

“And what the fuck is going on here, please?”

 

“Ahh, you found my present!”

 

The ghouls remained quiet and still as the Cardinal turned incredulously to the other man at the interruption. “Your… present? You put that thing here?”

 

“I thought it might be good enrichment for them. You know, like you buy a cat a toy fish to kick the shit out of.” The former Papa gestured extravagantly to the slightly shamefaced ghouls arrayed before him. “You ever seen that? They wanna disembowel it, and their little legs go kick-kick-kick. It’s really good for them. It’s instinct, it’s natural.” 

 

The Cardinal shot a look at Aether, partly still affronted but mostly confused. Aether shrugged fractionally. The man hadn’t known a damn thing about the natural behaviour and needs of ghouls if left unbothered by human intervention when he and Dew had been his musicians, and he obviously hadn’t used the vastly increased amount of leisure time he’d had since the... embarrassment... in Gothenburg to learn anything more. But hey, at least he always had good intentions.

 

“Look, I’ll find a video. It is murderous, but it’s cute.” The former Papa- or rather the  _ Terzo _ , as he was to be much more humbly referred to now- was already tapping away on his phone searching up something. The Cardinal visibly resisted the urge to slap it out of his hand. Many people found it hard to tell when the man was acting up to an audience, and assumed he was just that much of a ditz by nature; but Copia was by this point ninety-nine percent convinced that the other man was actually the most calculated little bastard in the building and simply chose to waste his machiavellian intelligence on devising new, ever more abstract ways to be  _ slightly _ annoying.

 

“Where are you taking this thing?” Copia asked of the ghoul gang, slightly dreading the answer but doing his best to re-route the conversation towards a swift and satisfactory end.

 

“Outside to burn,” Dew declared quickly, his tail flicking with excitement at the prospect and quietly hoping for his overseers’ approval.

 

“See? They’re having tons of fun already!” The  _ Terzo _ gestured triumphantly to the ghouls and their tacky plastic victim before diving back to his phone.

 

“That’s probably the best thing for it,” the Cardinal sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’d been about to excuse himself from the company of his former leader at the ghoul chapel and go searching for a fanged and horned friend to spend a pleasant winter evening with, and now instead he had a tension headache coming on. “Just don’t do it by the cars, or under the low trees, or directly on the grass, or beside any of the windows, huh?”

 

“Watch this one! Look at the little toe beans!” The  _ Terzo _ enthused, wagging his phone in Copia’s hang-dog face as the trio squeezed past them in the doorway with their glittery tree-trophy.

 

***

 

The instructions to stay away from anything else inherently flammable or breakable hadn’t left them many options for their impromptu sacrifice by conflagration, which was why they plumped for the middle of the stone steps leading down from the front entrance to the main ministry complex. There were no trees, parking spaces, windows or grass there, so surely it was ideal. There was the small issue of how occasionally the double doors would swing open and a clergy member would almost stagger into the small but chaotic scene, but if they were stupid enough to hear ghoul cackling and the lick of flames and still come out to investigate, that was their own problem.

 

The little tree, as Dew had predicted, did not burn well even under the strong fire his claws kindled with one strike, and it made an acrid stink. He jabbed his claws and tail at it’s sputtering plastic and metal frame to try and make a more dramatic bonfire, the flames of his own making nothing to his ashen hide. “Stupid thing,” he declared, finally losing patience and letting the tongues of fire snuff out as suddenly as he’d summoned them. The mangled thing smoked like a chimney and left a black char mark in the middle of the steps. “This is such a bad tradition. Doesn’t look good when it’s not on fire, doesn’t look good when it is. What’s the point?”

 

“It would have been better if it was a real one,” Aether conceded.

 

“What other things do the Christmas people do, Aether?” The small female shuffled closer to her companions conspiratorially. The Christian festivals weren’t forbidden knowledge per se, but it was certainly frowned upon to spend too much time reading up on the details. A few of the younger human clergy liked to antagonise the elders by wearing tacky jumpers depicting candy canes and snowmen ironically in December, rather than the customary Advent-time dress in the church that was strictly black and silver, and they seemed to find comedy in swapping suitably vandalised seasonal greeting cards. But other than that December was generally supposed to be a rather pious month at the church, with the avoidance of sickly-sweet Christmas media, a healthy amount of material indulgence, and long nights of pursuing sloth encouraged, and a concentration of sermons and rituals of various sizes and focuses for a few days around the Christian holiday day itself to help counter all the holy simpering going on out in the world beyond the ministry’s gates.

 

Aether shrugged dismissively. “Oh, they just put up more tacky decorations like these. And at night they have a special ritu- a service, in a church” he corrected himself, “at midnight.”

 

“Creepy,” She opined. “They’re supposed to hate it being dark, they’ve got no reason to suddenly be out skulking around using up a good winter night like that.”

 

“Of course, that’s just the ones that are actually devout that go to those,“ Aether carried on regardless, warming to his role as curator of human culture. “And that’s less and less every year, because all the rules and sermons are so boring, and make no sense next to all the stolen Pagan traditions. The rest, they all just gorge on meat and sweets and make spiced biscuits in the shape of little people and their houses, and eat them, and fight with their relatives because they can’t avoid them. And they do give each other presents, but they resent having to do it and get jealous of what other people recieve. They just forget all the love and light stuff. Can’t help themselves. It’s the easiest time of year for temptations, because it’s all money, money, money and greed.“

 

“That sounds more like it.” Dewdrop’s eyes shone with renewed interest at that, and his tail thumped against the stone steps where he crouched. “ _ I _ want meat and presents and a fight.”

 

“I think you’re imagining it wrong, Dew. It’s not like an organised tournament thing,” Aether tried to clarify gently.

 

Too late. Dewdrop was already stomping across the courtyard, pointing accusingly at the windows of the library building, where a few quiet but curious onlookers had gathered to peer at the odd display on the main steps. “Ifrit!  _ Ifrit _ ! Come out here! I see you! I want a Christmas fight!”

 

***

 

The Cardinal was swallowing his second Advil when an almighty metallic crash and a ragged crowd cheer outside made him start and nearly choke on the water he washed it down with. He banged his balled fist on his pained chest, rasping indistinct words of displeasure to himself, and made his way over to the bay window of his sleeping quarters to look down into the courtyard in the fading afternoon light. 

 

Two ghoul males scuffled like young bucks with their short sharp horns locked together, their heavy masks clashing with metal-on-metal screeches, to the delight of a small gaggle of ghouls and human novices who had been drawn to the edge of the courtyard by the general commotion. Copia was unlatching the window ready to bellow his disapproval down at the creatures when he noticed two crucial things- firstly, the stink of burnt plastic and the coils of smoke still rising from the smouldering, twisted pile of something black besmirching the stairs to the main entrance behind the playground fight ring, and secondly, the conniving idiot face of the _Terzo_ in the very front of the motley crew of onlookers, cheerfully relieving several over-excited Brothers and Sisters of no small amount of betting money.

 

Copia yanked the curtains shut with a groan of despair, spun about-face and flung himself down onto his bed, still fully dressed, clawing for a soft black satin pillow to clamp firmly over his ears.

 

-END-


End file.
